Purpose

This document is an overview of the recommended guidelines for connecting to Mercury™ SmartPrecision™ programmable interpolators. It will allow users to design connections which will ensure the best quality and most reliable encoder performance.

 

Background

The Mercury Series SmartPrecision™ interpolator design is based on a Field Programmable Gate Array or FPGA. The FPGA must be loaded with “code” each time the device is powered on. The code resides in a non-volatile memory device external to the FPGA called a Serial Flash chip. On each power-up, a micro-controller on the interpolator loads the code from the Serial Flash device into the FPGA

This code is originally loaded at the factory using “Reserved” pins on the interpolator’s HD15 connector. If noise is induced on one of these pins, a “false” download command may be interpreted. As a result, data in the Serial Flash chip can be corrupted. This data corruption will prevent the FPGA from being loaded properly at power-up and will interfere with the interpolator’s normal function. Units that have been corrupted in this fashion can be reprogrammed in the factory and returned to normal operation.

 

Solution

To prevent any issues with data corruption, follow these recommendations for connecting to the SS200c, SS300c, and SS350c SmartPrecisionTM interpolators with quadrature output or the SS300cSi and SS350cSi interpolators with SPI serial outputs.

   Warning: Do not apply power to your encoder until pin 1 has been grounded.

Fig 1. Example customer cable with pin 1 jumped with green wire to pin 13 (ground).

Recommended Mating Connectors

 

 

 

DO’S & DON’TS:

 

 

 

Please contact Celera Motion Applications Engineering group with any questions regarding these recommendations.